Different, Similar, Same

"What makes you miss your native country the most ?  Adisa Basic, my fellow writer, a poet and a journalist from Sarajevo asked me.

‘Almost everything’, I abruptly responded.

It was true. In America, daily routines are arranged systematically, allowing people to have carefree lives. The exhausting tasks that in our country (Burma) take hours to finish can here be completed by just a push to button. Whenever I think about these material developments that make life easier, I cannot help but remember my people who have to struggle in their everyday lives.  With respect to the spiritual growth of the people here, who learn that all people are worthy of respect, I was bothered when thinking about how our people are not allowed to feel empathy very much, because of the very demanding and troublesome daily struggles in poverty.  When crossing the thick layer of snow here, my mind would travel back to my native land, then in scorching heat. My homesickness or nostalgia was mostly based in the differences between the two respective countries.

New Orleans, however, changed my way of missing it.  Shady, with large green trees that  caused me to wipe sweat drops from my neck as I was walking,  here was the same air as the air of Burma. Most of the native flowers and herbs are also familiar in Burma. The jasmine shrubs blossoming in their whitest form were everywhere.   The blazing ground and the cool aromatic breeze provided the closest synonyms for Burma’s atmosphere that I have felt in a long time. Forget-me-nots, oleanders, mabolo trees, crotons and even the geographical surroundings made me feel as if this was Burma.

Another coincidence yet is the fact that New Orleans was tragically hit by the Hurricane     Katrina,  which arrived in August of 2005, at the rate of 175 mph.  It left 2000 people dead and 700,000 homeless.  I was told that the overall loss is as much as $81 billions.

On April 8, our ‘Writers in Motion’ group was scheduled to meet with John Biguenet, a professor at Loyola University as well as a writer. John explained to us in detail what they experienced during Katrina Hurricane.  Mentioning the inadequate aid and the delays in the rescue processes, he said people felt the former president Bush’s administration was to be blamed.  Victims were deprived of proper medicines and treatments. The mercury-contaminated tap-water led to thirst. Schools were interrupted for 6-7 weeks. 2,500 school children had to wait on the streets to attend class.  In a dramatic story he retold the nightmarish scenes of the crisis

That same afternoon we visited the hurricane-hit area on a Disaster Bus Tour. The woman who was our tour-guide noted that some shattered buildings were yet to be reconstructed.  But the formerly catastrophic area gave me a certain strange feeling.  The buildings, which were somewhat luxurious for our country’s standard, were standing neatly along the street. I witnessed families, gathering and sitting on benches beneath the shady trees in front of their houses, avoiding the scorching heat. Children were riding their bikes. People sitting under the trees waved their hands at every tour bus. The tour guide was briefing us in a style that went something like, ‘Do you see the man wearing white T-shirt and waving to us?  His father and daughter were killed by Katrina in that very house.’  After passing every thirty or forty houses, it was likely that we would witness a damaged roof-top or a collapsed wall, guided by the orderly voice: ‘Please look at that house. It couldn’t be rebuilt till now’.  Everybody in the bus sighed.

As for me, I was sitting stiff in my bus seat while my mind was in turmoil. It travelled back to my native land, hit by lethal cyclone Nargis, and to its victims.  We had landed in the Day Da Ye Township, a week after Nagis and witnessed many floating corpses in the river, for the death toll had been over 130,000. The air stank of rotten flesh. To reach the village we were headed for, we volunteer rescuers had to row the boat in a narrow creek that had been blocked by dead bodies.  Some of my companions had to clear the way by pushing them with bamboo sticks, thearing holes in the corpses’ decaying skin. The villagers cried and greeted us as they saw the approaching aid, bringing food and medications. We were the very first rescuers to reach them, 8 days after the storm. The whole village had been swept over by the sea water. The drinking well was contaminated by salt and by corpses, while extreme winds and waves followed, leaving nothing behind, not even to drink.  I could not bear thinking about how they survived such a catastrophe of hunger, let alone thirst.

John’s words appeared to my mind. ‘Katrina hit on Tuesday. There was no aid available, or rescuing underway, until Tuesday.’ A picture of the thousands of books damaged as waters entered into his house was displayed in a slide-show on his computer screen. John was explaining us emotionally about the circumstances during and after the disaster. That was the most agonizing period in his life, he told us.  Instead of his gleaming eyes, a pair of faint-yet-hopeful eyes appeared in my memory.

That was on the remarkable May 15, a dozen days after cyclone Nagis hit, on one of our typical every-three-days visits to the stricken area, as we traveled to another village in Day Da Yal township.  While we volunteers were carrying rice, potatoes, medicines and clothes from a chartered car to a motor-boat, a woman with faint eyes and messy hairs approached me timidly.

‘Where did you plan to go, dear?’ she asked.  I told her of our destination.

‘Were these items intended for the cyclone victims?’ she asked again.

‘Of course’ I assured her.

‘Which ministry you are from?’

I told her that we aren’t connected to any branch of government; that we are just a  volunteer group, searching for local and outside donations and visiting the victims’ sites in person, providing basic aid face to face. She was simply unable to conceal her surprise in her eyes. After a while, I heard her timid voice.

‘Would you come to our village too?’ She pleaded.

‘Did your village receive any aid?’ I asked.

‘Only once’, she muttered. 

‘What did you get?’ I asked with hope.



They were hungry

 I found myself covering my mouth with my hand to keeping from crying out, for the young woman’s answer made me almost mad.

‘Two days ago, drinking bottles were dropped from a helicopter. We had to rush to pick up one, in a stampede, exhausted. When I got the bottle, I emptied it in one gulp.  After the helicopter disappeared, we counted the bottles. Our village’s quota of drinking water was 23 bottles altogether’, she said.

.I have not told my experiences to John or to my companion writers. As a matter of fact, many people from all over like to learn from America, one of the best developed countries of the world.  My native country is a poverty-stricken nation where people are nearly dying of starvation in spite of its rich natural resources. It is the poorest developing country in the world as far as education, healthcare and many other social aspects are concerned .  

So, in matters of life and death, and with similar situations on hand, why was the response from the leaders of two such different countries somehow almost the same?  If we can see behind the "almost the same", we might find an answer in the similarity of power, which regulated the speed of response in both places.

Catastrophes and natural disasters are never good to witness. The suffering in New Orleans was lighter, ours was deeper, and such comparison makes Burma look worse. I know that. But I just couldn’t help to make the comparison anyhow.

Khet Mar.



Birmingham, 11 April, 2011
translated from the Burmese by Tazar



Damage in Burma 1



Damage in New Orleans







Damage in Burma 2



 

Reconstruction in New Orleans





Reconstruction in Burma 1



Reconstruction in Burma 2



For more writing on and by Khet Mar go to Sampsonia Way, the magazine of the City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, and to The Irrawaddy. For extensive coverage of Nargis, including some of the events and people described above, go to The New Yorker. The Burmese version of this piece can be found at MoeMaka Multimedia .





Ruins Of The River City Always In The ‘Future’ – A Narrative of Transcendence

Sometime during the tour I caught a late night stand-up comedian rant against the naming of American hurricanes and tornados. For laughs he blamed the 'cute' name Katrina for the disaster that became New Orleans in 2008 because people refused to take all forecasts seriously.  The city however has a general long history of ignoring what it considers a different universe, America. It remains unbothered with the scramble into America’s popular post-industrial culture of the other big cities we’ve visited and economy-cultures of new technologies, coffee franchises, giant hospitals and universities. It is a large unending street of seafood, dance and jazz. The experiential outstrips the advertised and the mediated.

New York for the outsider always lives up to its hype, at least as a physical spectacle, a developer’s ego gone deliciously mad with concrete and steel towers with the world’s biggest set of tribal villages stacked below like overlapping dominoes in supplicant worship. New Orleans remains out of the reach of the new urban mega-planner who works in standard neon, strip-mall and freeway. It retains Frenchmen and Bourbon as street names, balconies that are a fingertip touch away across its streets, a street-car that crawls with charm, where the ancient art of walking is still a pleasure within its inner recesses. Row upon row of shotgun houses ignore the lemming call of the American suburb. Boiled crawfish rules over the cheeseburger.

It is a city that lies in thrall to the Mississippi and Atchafalaya River-Gods who created it with deposits of land sediments for centuries. Then, the tide turned and it is now being eaten up by the Atlantic, cutely-named hurricanes, the oil and gas industry and Louisiana State negligence if not corruption. If New Orelans remains incomprehensible to America’s macro-economic psyche, oil and gas are still major facts. And maybe the reason that the federal government had the port running three days after Katrina as its citizens swam on its streets and huddled under its Convention Center.

Creator of ‘The Wire’, David Simon, told our group when we visited 'Treme' 's set (otherwise known as Frenchmen's Street) that New Orleans is still somewhat one of the places beyond the reach of American Capital and its crushing of labor and blue-collar traditions. And 'Treme',  his poetic post-script after Baltimore, underscores New Orleans as a place that defies plot, where a major city-based show can be pitched on something as abstract as culture and become more concrete than TV’s hospital ERs or police departments. It is artistic refuge from the obvious T.V network hooks helped along by the elements of weather if not fiction. If The Wire is Simon’s Baltimore serial-novel, 'Treme', Writer John Biguenet says, is a fitting poem of a New Orleans and Katrina that has been completely misunderstood by America. For his own work on a city where he has lived for most of his life, Biguenet could only find reciprocity for the city’s new narratives and realities in Murakami’s post-earthquake Kobe, Günter Grass’s post-war Dresden and a Russia after Chernobyl. 

If New Orleans refused to leave with the coming of the high water, winds and unrelenting heat, it might have also been in instinctual defiance of the larger idea of American mobility. And so one also feels an existentialism rather than America’s perpetual optimism. Many an American city has been destroyed by Hollywood’s meteors, aliens, giant insects and giant gorillas – New Orleans after Katrina remains an apocalyptic reality of human error through faulty Army Corps engineering. It is also American farce. All of America’s helicopters were in Iraq and unavailable for rescue when one of the largest disasters in urban America took place. New Orleans is no stranger to death. It has ‘died’ before many times – Spanish influenza almost wiped it out in 18^th Century. Yellow Fever, cholera, fire and of course floods have taken their stab at it. And all those who passed on, ‘live’ in the present buried above ground in the city’s cemeteries floating above the low water table with the living.

New Orleans resists America’s addiction to rebuilding, its perpetual myth of a ‘New World’. Miss Sparrows, an old slave exchange establishment in New Orleans, is now a coffee shop that the City’s 10 million tourists pass through every year. It retains Spanish and French influences before Jefferson bought it as of the Louisiana Purchase. And thereafter refused to become part of the plantation South even if it began as a slave port. Biguenet described how the Civil War ended its growth even as industrial America came of age in the cities of the American South. Today, New Orleans retains one of the worst education and health systems in America. It is where Bush’s ironic mantra of ‘less government’ really meant 'no government'  during Katrina. And where long-held ideas of the ‘individual’ and ‘family’ as key social institutions were put to the sword. Conspiracy theory suggests that its loyalty to the Democratic Party in a then largely Republican world ultimately led to federal indifference.

Charlie Duff, our guide in Baltimore, described New Orleans as a city of one million where two million people lived. But it was also where before Katrina that a happiness index was highest in urban America even as the poverty index remained lower than the national average. Greg Guillard, Cajun writer, among many other things, describes Cajun life philosophy as life as an exercise in ‘fun’ rather than the pursuit of the material. Realities in New Orleans however are now a kind of slow death by a thousand economic cuts. Big Insurance refuses to pay up for Katrina’s destruction and the middle-classes take to drinking and despair. The poor are largely unable to return after Katrina.

In contrast to America's 'open' mythical landscape, New Orleans is surrounded by an increasingly tragic and complex hinterland of swamps, bayous, estuaries, wetland and submerged cypress forests. And they ultimately further create a singularity and transcendence to the city - and all the above become somewhat fitting narratives to the city. Elsewhere they would stupify. New Orleans tests the very idea and definition of recovery in America and to what ends the city after Katrina will strive for. The old New Orleans, Biguenet tells us, has fallen and the city will never be the same. Some might call this is recovery. One can’t help feeling that what happened in New Orleans beyond Katrina might have been a payment of dues for its exceptionality in a larger American psyche. But at the same time that the fall of New Orleans shows them up for what they are. Myths. That New Orleans transcends.    

Two Houses

The cemetery of New Orleans is what I think of this morning, a Sunday, standing outside Trinity Bible Church in Lafayette, Louisiana. I'm looking for some other place to shelter but all I see are fast food restaurants, a highway, and Trinity Bible's electric signboard ("Find us on Facebook!").

After nearly forty-five minutes, I had left the crisp, air-conditioned church where the Pastor was rowing powerfully through the stories of Moses, Joshua, the chosen people and their first step into the bounty of the promised land. "'I will give you every piece of land you step upon,'" the Pastor had said, intoning the voice of God. "The country you are about to conquer: Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, they're not going to just pack up their homes and go. There's going to be a war." The Pastor's face radiated triumphant sunshine. "God never reneges on a promise. It's not about how good Moses is. It's about the goodness of God. 'I will give you every place where you set your foot.' God promised the land."

Soon after, I had stood up and left. It was clear to me that this House was not mine. Left to my own devices I might pick a fight (once again), and so I chose the wiser path: to stand amongst the shiny cars in the parking lot rather than inside the belly of the Old Testament. As I pushed through the double doors, the Pastor's voice followed me via a sophisticated audio hook-up system: "To navigate properly, you have to keep your eyes on the Word."

While waiting in the parking lot outside, it's New Orleans that looms large in my mind. To protect them from the rising water, the dead in New Orleans are buried above ground; the concrete chambers stand in neat rows like a city of the dead. John Biguenet, who gave us this description, then directed our attention to the living--men and women rebuilding after the levees broke in 2005, and those without the means to come home.

"No American understands what happened here," he said. "They don't comprehend what it is to lose a city." Immediately after the catastrophe, New Orleans was occupied by Humvees, military and mercenaries, including Blackwater. "Everywhere you went," Biguenet says, "someone was holding a gun." Terrified of looters, the powers that be set their sights on American citizens.

On August 29, 2005, the levees of New Orleans were breached in more than 50 locations, a catastrophic disaster caused by design failures "so obvious and fundamental" that the United States Army Corps of Engineers would finally, after months of about-facing, admit some culpability. In Biguenet's play, Rising Water, a man and woman wake to find their bed surrounded by a foot of water. They climb upstairs, and then up to the attic, and finally through a vent--except that one of them, Sugar, can't get all the way through. The play ends with Camille on the roof and Sugar unable to free himself, waiting for help "that does not come". Rising Water has an innocence and ease which makes it all the more harrowing: how easy it is to be left behind. How easy it is to become detritus.

During the service this morning, the Pastor had spoken of how God parted the waters for Moses. "He stops the river upriver... what they're left with is dry land. 'I'm gonna give you the land.' God has not changed. The promises of God have not changed." The Pastor asks us to celebrate to the blessings of God's constancy. "You got to believe those things."

One of my fellow writers asked someone here why this catastrophe befell the residents of New Orleans. "That happens," she said, "to people who put their faith in institutions other than God."

In New Orleans, we had visited St. Bernard Parish and the Lower 9th Ward. We saw the houses not yet rebuilt six years after the levees broke; we saw abandoned hospitals, boarded up schools, and many, many empty lots. "This place," the otherwise chirpy tour guide had said, as we passed through a collapsed neighborhood, "is not coming back." Some homes still bore the insignia of a spraypainted X on their walls, marking the date military units arrived at the property, the existence or non-existence of toxic water, and the number of dead people and animals. Charlie Duff had entreated us: "If you see something that doesn't make sense, ask why."

Here is my question: how can there ever be a recovery if a place, a country, does not notice that there is anything to recover from?

Life goes on, or rather...

We tend to believe that things are replaceable. Our clothes last hardly a season or two, we throw away eternal lasting plastic dishes as soon as we quench our hunger. By tomorrow, everything we have will appear in a better, smaller, more perfect version. The only problem is that we slowly start to believe that people can be replaced much the same way. No doubt, our job could be certainly done equally well by many others. There are also those waiting in a line to jump into our lives, to love our lovers, take our kids to kindergartens, put their clothes into our closets.

Because whatever happens, life goes on… There are very few things so encouraging and yet so frightening as knowing that there is so much truth in a well-worn phrase that life goes on. Sometimes slowly and painfully, with hesitance, other times easily and energetically, without fear, but one stands up after falling down. And then what. We shake it off, count our loses and move on. We round off casualties to the nearest number (History rounds off skeletons to zero, a thousand and one is still only a thousand …). On anniversaries, we pay our respect, fix what’s broken and quickly put on the mask of normality. We hail the recovery as a sign of strength. Should a tear appear after some time, we’ll quickly wipe it away, secretly, with a feeling of uneasiness…

One can have a pleasant time in New Orleans oblivious of what happened here six years ago. The city has been given a makeover for tourists, it has put on a smile, opened its shops and restaurants, offering souvenirs, massage, sightseeing tours. New Orleans again gives what everyone has come for – a place of great and unlimited fun where one can smoke in bars, listen to the street music and be free. The Music Festival is on and the French Quarter is swarming with people. Old people dance passionately in front of the stage looking as if the faith in flower power has never died. A group of people are laughing under a small tree, talking shelter from the warm spring sun: they’re wearing cheerful red lobster hats on their heads. Beautiful students dressed up in a carefully careless way, moving their hips in the rhythm of the music. Life triumphs. There is no yesterday. We don’t look backwards.

This abundance of colors, aromas and sounds, a sunny day that always makes the world look more beautiful, all that fights against the gloomy thoughts and calls for oblivion. Amnesia is healing, it makes life easier. How else could we live. On a day like this, how would it feel to think about which one of those nice and hospitable people, a few years ago, was the first to make step towards bestiality, the first to pull the gun. And who was standing hopelessly on the roof, with no one to expect.

Blissful in our forgetfulness we taste gumbo, throw coins to street musicians, drink cocktails and expose our pale bodies to the warm sun for the first time this year. And everything is happening for the first time. It is the power of life that makes sprouts break through the earth in April which indeed is the cruelest month. The explosion of that magnificent cruelty is happening before our own eyes. All the way in the corner of the picture, a young mother with ample bust is feeding her baby on a lawn, they’re both unperturbed by the noisy clamor around them. Relentless and unstoppable, life goes on… The shivers going down the spine of a bystander may just be those of excitement over the power of nature and not of bewilderment and horror.